TECH
TALK: Multi-Model Minds: Correcting Education
While each of us can alter and build our own multiple models, it
is an uphill struggle once we are past the initial years in
educational institutions. We stand at the crossroads in India. We
have the advantage of demographics on our side. We need to address
the twin challenges of educating India's youth and doing it right.
Education done right can be IndiaÂs biggest change agent.
Conversely, putting people with limited and incomplete mental
models in decision-making positions can worsen the situation
dramatically.
So, what does it take for us to fix the problem at the source?
Atanu
Dey wrote about how to re-invent the education system recently
on his blog:
I think that at a minimum, an educational system must teach people
how to think. How to fast and how to wait would be good but perhaps
it is too much to ask for right now. Does such a system exist
anywhere in the world? I don't know for sure but I doubt it very
sincerely. I realize of course that there are people who have gone
through the current educational systems and they are also able to
think. But I would be wary of ascribing that result to the present
setup. It is more likely that despite the present system, those
people have learnt how to think.
I believe that learning how to think may be something alike to
learning a language. It appears that we have a language learning
sub-system in our brains which shuts down sometime around age 12 or
so. Before reaching that age, you can very easily learn languages;
after that, learning languages is extremely hard. So also, I
believe that if you catch a kid early enough, you can teach him or
her to think. It is as if the brain circuits are just a lot of
firmware in early childhood and then as one grows up, the firmware
hardens and become hardware that cannot be re-programmed.
Here is my prescription for a good education. Focus primarily on
teaching how to think and on teaching people how to learn. Teaching
how to think is like giving kids a very high powered CPU. Teaching
them how to learn gives them control of a very broadband channel
through which they can have access to content that the CPU can
process. Alternative analogy: good thinking skills is like have a
good operating system. And good learning skills is like having a
great set of applications.
A multi-model mind can be our greatest asset as we seek to build
both our careers and the new India around us. But for that to
happen, we will have to shed some of the baggage from the
past and that is not going to be easy. We need to make a
start with the world inside us, and then the outside. We have the
benefit of technological revolutions that are happening around us
giving us the ability to compress time -- we don't have a
generation to effect this change.
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